#22565 - 10/27/0204:42 AMWar protests around the country and the world

Anonymous
Unregistered

I am impressed with the numbers that turned out to show their opposition to the planned war against Iraq both here in the US and around the world. <br><br>America, I didn't think you still had it in you, but I was wrong. Good to see people speaking up about it.<br><br>You may now return to your usual lite format of useless chatter. No offense intended.<br><br>

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#22570 - 10/27/0206:29 PMRe: War protests around the country and the world
[Re: steveg]

Anonymous
Unregistered

Steve, I am about the most radical person you may ever know. But, even in the 60s I never felt the need to grow my hair long so I could look like a hippie. It's the philosophy you hold and not the appearance that makes you what you are politically.<br><br>

#22571 - 10/27/0206:35 PMRe: War protests around the country and the world
[Re: OSXaddict]

Anonymous
Unregistered

You are doing a good job of not responding. But, why not respond? <br><br>I think the war protests are a good thing, gotta show some opposition before this moron in the White House takes us to a place we shouldn't have to go to that may well unleash a fury in the Islamic world that we haven't seen before.<br><br>Hey, of course, no one has to respond to this. I understand if you don't want to talk politics, no problem. Maybe there are a few here that can pull themselves away from the lite stuff and look at something important going on in our country right now. I'd welcome your comments.<br><br>

Preface: I am dead set against any war of aggression, and I see the US posturing against Iraq as aggression pure and simple--well not very pure and certainly not simple, but I hope you see what I mean <br><br>That said, I wonder whether you would ever see war as justified. That's a real question, not flame bait or even idle curiosity. I really want to know.<br><br>I'll tell you what I think. I think that in a well-run planet, there would be no need for war, period. We don't have a well-run planet, but I think such a thing would not be impossible to accomplish. As I've said elsewhere, I'm a socialist by inclination, and now I'll declare that I'm an internationalist as well. By that I mean that the planet ought to be governed in the same way that a nation-state is governed. We have the bare sketch of such a government in the UN and the International Court of Justice. That those institutions aren't effective has a lot to do with the shape of the world at the end of WW II, I think, and with an incredibly out-of-date notion of sovereignty, inscribed in the founding documents of the UN but in fact falsified on an almost yearly basis from the end of WW II to the present. In practice sovereignty really applies only to the five post-war major powers, and nowadays perhaps only to the single megapower.<br><br>But what exactly sovereignty means, even for the megapower, is a curious thing. I'm not certain at all. In the olden days of yore (a quotation from a student paper some years ago ) a sovereign was a person, the monarch. I can sort of understand sovereignty when applied to an individual (although even there I'm baffled by the presupposition that the individual can control himself absolutely: every time I fart without wanting to I put the lie to the idea). But sovereignty in regards to nation-states really baffles me, unless it means that a nation-state can do whatever it pleases at any time, without consulting any other country. That's certainly the way that the US seems to treat its sovereignty, anyway--and it certainly was the way that the major powers of the post-WW II world conceived of their sovereignty, although of course France and the UK soon enough began to discovere their limitations as sovereing nations in that sense I've tried to define.<br><br>Anyway, it's the idea of sovereignty as the right to do whatever a nation wants that seems to me the danger to the world. I'm not even thinking about the Iraq thing in particular, although one can see that the US wants to make the case that Iraq is behaving as if it were a sovereign nation because it is doing what it wants regardless of what other nations might say about it. The only response to sovereignty thus conceived, it seems to me, is to reconstruct the UN charter and the World Court so that together they become an effective world government. That means that all nations have to abandon the illusion that they are sovereign--something that would be particularly hard to do for the major powers, and in particular for Russia, China, and the US. The difficulty comes from the idea that it's really only the major powers that have the remotest claim to be sovereign. The rest of the world, more or less explicitly, recognizes the limitations to their sovereignty that come from not being as powerful as the US, for instance.<br><br>It would be terribly difficult to produce a system of government that would balance population against land-mass against GDP. But I'm afraid that if the world fails to find such a balance, which then leads to a real world government, we will see more and more instability in the world, and more and more wars. The irony of it all, I think, is that the more instability there is, the more will the sovereignty of the major powers be challenged and ultimately undermined completely.<br><br>So to get back to whether I think there are any justifiable wars, I guess the answer is no. There ought to be legal means to seek redress from rouge states or groups. And since at present there is no such method of seeking redress, we ought to start working towards producing one.<br><br>Great wits are sure to madness near allied.--John Dryden, "Absalom and Achitophel"<br>

Without going into a lot of detail explaining my response, I feel we SHOULD have kicked the crap out of Iraq years ago when we had a REASON to (during the Golf War). We let that murdering stick in the mud keep control, and that was a big mistake. However now, I feel that the only reason we are threatening attack is to draw attention away from the fact that we haven't nailed Bin Laden down and Bush will look bad without some kind of military victory - which will kill his re-election campaign much the same as it hurt his fathers campaign.<br><br>I'm against war, simply because people die that don't deserve it. However I support our military and I wouldn't have it in me to protest what our men and women are doing to protect my freedoms.<br><br><br><br>[color:red] Kiss My Banana!</font color=red>

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